Final Film Production 'Alone'

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

As we have been influenced by several other film trailers that we have analysed such as Eagle Eye and 28 Days Later, we tried to pick out the conventions that our film can adhere to from those different thriller trailers. One of which is characters. It is conventional as well as expected by the audience in a thriller film to be a victim or a victim/hero like in our film as well as villains or criminals that in constant chase of the victim/hero throughout the film. Another convention of thriller films is also the lead role being male. This is where we have subverted a convention because we chose for our lead role to be a female. This is because we thought the experience of an immigrant in London would look more effective if shown by a female character as she can show more vulnerability and innocence.

To make our characters look 'real' and portray their roles properly, we had to carefully pick out their costumes so they match the role they take in the film. For example, Nancy the main character is an immigrant and also homeless. So we had to pick out a costume that looks dirty and ragged. Her hair also had to be messy and no make-up on. As for the villains, they were dressed smartly in black because they are high status criminals and the colour black adds mysteriousness to their roles. Rawan, who is another victim was dressed casually with jeans and a jacket. Her hair was down which implies she's innocent.

The props were another convention we had to follow. We used 'typical' props that are expected to be used in a thriller film like blood, a knife and a car. This also helped portray realism and also added elements of horror to the trailer.

The lighting used in the trailer was dark. This is to add a sinister feeling to the film and is also a convention that we had to follow as the genre implies that the colours and the lighting of the film cannot be happy and bright. So even in bright weather and brightly lit locations we had to edit the colours and make them darker which we thought worked very well to help show the gritty side of London. This leads on to the locations we shot our film trailer in. We chose two different varieties of locations to compare and contrast between them. We chose locations that are mainly tourists attractions and places in alleyways and mainly working-class to show the different things that happen in the two and how different people are in different areas of London.

The soundtrack was also another element of the trailer we had to carefully think about. This is because we had to have different paced music throughout the trailer. This worked very well and added something to the trailer as it portrayed the characters feelings and their situations under different circumstances. So when the main character is alone, the music was slow and it speeds up with a chase or fast edited shots. We also had a voice-over at the beginning of the film. This helped establish a bit of the film to the audience as well as give a brief description of what the main characters life is like and what her role in the film is.

We had a variety of camera shots and angles in the trailer which also said something about the main character. We had more than one high-angle shot. This is to show the main characters' vulnerability and weakness at times when she is alone and the final shot when she is caught by the criminals. We also used P.O.V shots which put the audience in the characters shoes and made them feel the pressure. The P.O.V shots we used were of a hand-held camera angle. This also added agitation and tension to the characters situation.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The way in which we are going to display our brand identity is by keeping a coherent style, by following certain rules such as, keeping the font the same style and using the same colour scheme throughout all of the media texts such as moving image, print based and our logo.

We have applied more than one element of our film to the rest of our production pieces, this is to help enhance our brand identity and make them easier to be identified by the audience. For example, the dark colours used in the trailer was added to all three posters and the magazine. This helped signify the relationship between them as they all look like they link together. Another aspect which helped familiarise all the products is the font. We specifically made sure that the same font is used in the trailer, magazine and posters.

The locations where we filmed our trailer were also similar to those in the poster and magazine. However, the ones in the ancillary tasks had to be mainly locations that are iconic of London which was one of the main aspects of our brand identity as it helps shows the glamorous side of London that is glossed over by tourism and consumerism, this contrasted with the gritty, working-class side of London that tourists do not usually see through main attractions.

As we have three different posters, we also tried to keep a coherent style within them. So the font was the same, the black & white and red writing was the same, the iconic places of London were also another thing the posters had in common. But we wanted to add something else that the film and the magazine did not have. The eyes added at the top of each poster signifies that someone is always watching, and that the main character is always being chased and watched by the criminals that would not leave her alone until they take away her life. We thought this worked well in connoting elements of plot of the trailer as well as keeping all three posters similar in a way.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

In the early stages of our production we had an audience feedback to help us add or takeaway things from the trailer which will help make it better. A lot of it at the time was negative as they scenes for a trailer were too long, the lighting was too happy and bright, and that various angles and shots should be added. After doing all those we carried out interviews with about 6 different people to give us feedback to the final production of the trailer after all sound and effects were added.

Fortunately, most of the feedback that time was positive but we also did have some negative stuff about the logo, some of the scenes and the characters roles. So we made a vox pops out of the interviews we carried out. We added bits from the film to the vox pops which made it look professional.

Adding our film to YouTube was also another feature we benefited from as we got feedback from people that watched our film and fellow students from out school. This enhanced our view of our film as most of the comments were positive and the audience seemed impressed by the trailer and the way we helped portray each characters role.

4. How did you use technologies in the construction stage, and in the research, planning & evaluation stages?

The hardware we used throughout the process of filming our trailer helped enhance it in different ways. The camera we used was HQ and it definitely added a better look to the film as it was clear and of a high quality. It also helped when we were filming at night and the depth of zoom we used in certain scenes. The voice recorder we used for the voice-over was also HQ and helped make the sound clear.

Final Cut Pro helped us with the editing process as it had many features we used in our film to help develop it further. For example the colour correction which helped us play with the colours and lighting of the film moved our trailer a step further as it looked more professional and gritty especially locations such as the underground. Final Cut Pro also helped us with the vox pops and evaluation of the trailer as it allowed us to embed our Powerpoint slides and images. Additionally, it helped us embed our soundtrack for the trailer from Soundtrack Pro.

Other software we used were Photoshop and InDesign CS4. Photoshop was mainly used to edit images so we used it when making our posters. The effects Photoshop were great they were also quite similar to Final Cut. Effects such as the colour correction were similarly used in Photoshop and that's how this helped develop our brand identity. We also used Photoshop to edit the main image of the magazine. But the rest of the magazine was made using InDesign CS4. It had many effects that go into detail which only made InDesin easier to use. Effects such as the colours, shapes and outlines really helped bring out the best of the magazine as we added many elements to it which were influenced by Empire magazine and the Avatar issue specifically.

Soundtrack Pro is another software we used. Soundtrack was used to pick those different pieces of music that were added together to make our soundtrack. It had a different variety of music which really helped us pick out the right ones for our film. We used about 5 different pieces of music and put them together in the right order which went with the order of things happening in the trailer.

Powerpoint is the final software we used throughout the process of the film. We used it for our evaluation and pitch .

Blogger is where we laid all our work for the rest of the group to look at and edit and for our teacher to give us feedback on. Blogger was extremely useful when being used as a group as we all had access to it from home and we didn't have to be together as a group when working on it.

'Alone' Magazine Cover

Again, after looking at other film magazines we acknowledged that it did not adhere to the conventions of an ordinary magazine. This is because it had a couple of mistakes such as the title of the film being bigger than the title of magazine which did not look balanced, the magazine cover also did not have any secondary features or other subtitles of articles it contains or even an issue date. We then went on and produced a final draft of our magazine and added all the missing conventions to it.
The brand identity of the magazine is keeping with the same images of iconic London and the same dark yet bright colours we are using such as red, black and white.

The only character that will be on the front cover of our magazine will be Nancy. This is one of the conventions we will adhere to on the magazine cover as most magazine covers always feature the main character(s) of a film. Other conventions we will be adhering to are secondary images of different images from our film, a sky-liner placed at the top of the magazine title. We are also adding a slogan for the magazine and a tag-line for the film.

We have chosen the style of our magazine to be simple and clear-cut. That is part of our brand identity as we have also decided to follow that same style on our poster campaign. The colours and the effects we have added to the image of the magazine is also coherent to our other products as it follows the same style as our brand identity.

This is the final production of our magazine cover:

'Alone' Film Poster

The poster of our film will have an image of one of the locations of where the trailer will be filmed at. And above it will be another image of two eyes. They represent the fact that the girl in the big city of London is on her own and is being watched by people all the time.

We think that the eyes will add mystery to the poster and that is what we want.

We have mostly used dark colours such as red, black and blue this is to represent the mysteriousness of the film. The brand identity of the poster will be clean-cut,simple and easy to look at and understand. Even though the eyes will be there to symbolise something, it still won't be something messy and crowded by many items being in the mise-en-scene.
The conventions that we will be adhering to in the poster are things such as the title of the film placed at the bottom of the poster with the date of release under the title. As the slogan exemplifies what happens in the film, placing it at the top is like giving them an idea of what happens in the film and then they move down to look at the image in the poster itself.
After analysing a couple of thriler posters, we realised that the first draft of our poster did not follow the conventions of a film poster as it only had an image and the title of the film. So in our final draft we added The release date of the film as well as a website and a tagline for the film. This made it look more professional as now it could fit in with other real film posters.

We decided to put 3 poster campaigns that all looks different and are set in different iconic London locations:
For the posters we used Photoshop. I used Photoshop to crop and resize the main image, erase background that is not needed, fade colours, colour correction, used a variety of fonts to layers to create a depth and drama to the main image.
We used these tools to give our posters a familiar style to our trailer also to stick with our conventions.